Our Story

As geopolitical competition, economic dislocation, technological disruption, and climate change all began to accelerate in the late 2000s, Parag Khanna and Greg Lindsay authored an essay for Reuters asking, “Where will you live in 2050?” Assessing the wide range of risks impacting the globe, they identified regions most likely to adapt to rising global complexity and remain desirable destinations. This inquiry became the seed for Parag’s 2021 book MOVE: Where People are Going for a Better Future, a study of the future of human geography as the world population plateaus and climate change unleashes mass migrations.

While researching the book, Parag and his brother Gaurav also scoured the country for climate-resilient locations for their parents’ retirement. Parag enlisted FutureMap’s research director Kailash Prasad to correlate the climate profiles of various locations with forecasted property values. “Climate Oases” was thus launched as a FutureMap practice area, with the name changed to Climate Alpha to denote locations that would outperform the market amidst rising climate stress. Kailash also designed the logo: the Greek letter χ (και) embedded in a geodesic pattern.

Early during the Covid pandemic in 2020, the Singapore government generously provided a grant to Climate Alpha to build out its data science capabilities, and Abraham Wu of the Future Cities Lab at the National University of Singapore was recruited as Chief Technology Officer and April Zhu as Director of Design & Experience. The core team also included software engineer Mehroz Ahmed and project manager Madeeha Akbar from AI solutions company Addo, founded by Parag’s wife Ayesha. Climate Alpha’s first priorities were to collect large datasets spanning property prices, climate models, and socio-economic trends, build a scenario platform that applies machine learning to account for non-stationary climate variables and forecast valuations, and deploy a SaaS interface to visualize the analysis.

Climate Alpha filed a patent application for its Scenario Forecaster in early 2022, and also began working with major real estate developers such as Lennar and Capitaland. Chris Marlin, former president of Lennar International, became chairman of Climate Alpha’s board, which includes (as of mid-2022) Michael Ferrari, Steve Weikal, Kathy Baughman McLeod, and Chris Riebold. In late 2022, Climate Alpha raised a seed funding round and expanded its team to nearly twenty people spanning Singapore, South Asia, Eastern Europe, New York, and San Francisco. Climate Alpha also became an industry partner of the MIT Center for Real Estate.

With Covid and climate change heralding a fundamental reset in where and how people live and businesses operate, Climate Alpha is focused on adapting society and the economy to the new patterns of mobility and investment that lie ahead.

You can stay updated on Climate Alpha’s latest customers, publications, and other news across this website.